In the late 1970s, I stayed at my grandparents’ antique-filled house in Illinois for a few days. Looking for something to do, I found a pile of comics. They were beat up, as though someone had read them many times.

Ghost stories. Horror stories. Superhero tales. There was Man-Thing and Ghosts and Witching Hour, World’s Finest and Supergirl. Monster stories about an alien who comes to Earth to defeat all of the humans in any sport imaginable before conquering the planet, and finally a man claiming to be the world’s top sleeper challenges the alien to beat his sleeping record of 1,000 years. A similar story where an alien conqueror lands on a planet and can’t find any life forms to conquer, and in the end it turns out the aliens look like rocks. And another story where a flying saucer observes the planet, thinks the automobiles are lifeforms and kills off all of the annoying parasites infesting the cars (because the aliens look similar to cars).

Then I turned to the superhero stuff. Found a Supergirl story where Linda Danvers’ college roommate knows her secret identity, and it turns out that it’s because of an alien plant that Linda keeps in her room. A Flash story where a criminal keeps eluding The Flash by changing places with other people; it turns out the guy can swap positions with anyone so long as he has a sample of their D.N.A. … and since he’s a barber, he has plenty of hair samples to choose from. (In the end…I still think this is stupid… Flash sees that the hair the guy is about to use is that of Barry Allen. Recognizing your own hair from across a room is a pretty neat trick.) The Green Lantern space stories with Space Manna and Itty and the Vivarium.

It’s because of finding this batch of really warped comics that I developed my lifelong love of them. At the time, I never bothered to ask where they came from. I just thought grandmas naturally kept that stuff on hand for their grandkids.

I turns out they were my uncle Leslie’s comics. My mom’s youngest brother, Leslie was only 15 when I was born and the comics I’d found had only recently been abandoned. He was my coolest uncle, because he was a young man himself. In the early 1980s he introduced me to “Doctor Who” and when my parents were still financially struggling and watching every penny, he did something I still can’t get over: taking us to an arcade and letting us spend twenty whole dollars playing video games!

I just found out that my uncle Les died tonight in a car accident. He was on his way home from work, driving into the sunlight, and he was passing a semi when he suddenly saw an oncoming car he was about to hit. According to an off-duty policeman who was right behind him, Les jerked his car to avoid the collision and went into the ditch. He had an airbag and always wore his seatbelt, and the doctors say he didn’t have a mark on him…but his neck snapped in all the tumbling about. As sad as all this is, I’m grateful that he went in the most fast and painless way possible…and that his last act was to avoid colliding with the car or the semi.

I loved my Uncle Les a lot. He was funny and friendly, and didn’t mind just hanging out with his nephews. I probably owe him everything for putting me on the comic book path.

I will most likely be away from Monitor Duty for the next few days as we attend the funeral. Hopefully the other guys won’t mind covering my shift in the monitor room.

I was supposed to be spending the next four days furiously promoting Job Wanted to all the comic shops in the world during this narrow window for ordering it…my To Do List for the next four days was packed with promotional work…and I don’t know what kind of crimp this is going to put in our roll-out. I’d like to apologize to all of my fellow creators on this project, because I know you’re all counting on me to get our book out there…but this phone call has flattened all of the energy I had bubbling up ever since I found out that we were listed in Previews today. This had started out as one of my all-time best days…

Sorry if my post isn’t the cheeriest one. I know you all don’t come to Monitor Duty to read sad missives, but I wanted everyone to know about this guy who was so important to who I am as a person today. Don’t worry about me, I am all right and I’ve got my wonderful wife to hug and cry with. I will be back in a few days.